Sermon for the 20th Sunday after Pentecost         

10/2/05  Preached at ULC

Text:  Philippians 3:7-8   Title:  The Loss of All Things

Main Message:  Christ is worth more than all the things of this world.

Dear friends in Christ…

Today’s second reading said these words:  Whatever gains I had, these I have come to regard as loss because of Christ.  More than that, I regard everything as loss because of the surpassing value of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord.  For his sake, I have suffered the loss of all things.”

For most of September, I had the duty and the privilege of ministering with people who had suffered the loss of all things, at least all things that you can put a dollar value on.  I want to share their story with you this morning.  I want to share with you what they shared with me, and especially I want to share with you how together we could see and feel the Spirit of the Living God among those who have lost so much.

I’ll start my story on Sunday of Labor Day weekend.  It was a few days after Hurricane Katrina had smashed on shore, and we had prayed during worship for the survivors and the relief workers going to help.  A couple people asked me if I thought I’d be mobilized with the Guard, and my answer was no.  The word from Minnesota’s adjutant general was that enough troops from other states were already on the way.

There weren’t, however, enough chaplains, and on my e-mail inbox was a message from Washington looking for volunteers.  I was barely back from a month of training in S.C., so I had no plans to go, but that night my chaplain boss called me and said, “Chaplain Timm, I think we need you.”  He’s a full bird colonel; I’m a lieutenant.  For those of you who don’t understand the Army system, that means I had just volunteered, and it was time to start packing.

I went with one other chaplain, another Lutheran pastor from SW MN by the name of Major Bill Klavetter, who happens to be friends w/ULC’s Gordy Trelstad from his days as a pastor.  Cliché it may be, but it’s a small world.  Each one of us had a chaplain’s assistant whose job as always was to keep the chaplains safe and make sure they didn’t do anything stupid.  It’s a much harder job than it sounds, so my wife tells me.

Our mission was to link up with the State Chaplain from Mississippi and receive further instructions.  100 miles inland from the MS coast, we already started seeing the damage.  By the time we got to our stop for the night, we discovered a big problem.  We had good directions to the camp, but most of the street signs and highway markers were gone.  So it was very late at night by the time we finally rolled in.

In the morning, we were able to see the devastation that had been hidden by the darkness.  It’s strange how in the middle of something so overwhelming, you can’t process it all at once, so you find yourself noticing little things one at a time.  The first thing I noticed was the trees that were snapped in half or completely uprooted.  There were hundreds of them just in our location.  I talked with someone later from a forestry crew who said there was enough downed timber in LA and MS for 400,000 homes, if it could ever be harvested, which most of it couldn’t. 

The other thing I noticed was how the roadsides seemed naked because as I said, there were almost no road signs to be seen, and no billboards, no power lines, nothing artificial left standing.  It’s strange because normally I think of billboards as clutter, but when all that remains is the steel structure that once held up the advertisement, it’s like looking at a skeleton where you expect to see flesh and blood.

And that was still inland.  We were assigned to a unit near the coast.  We went through towns like Gulfport, Bay St. Louis, Pearlington, Pass Christian.  They were largely poor towns to begin with and now they were just gone.  Hundreds of buildings had completely ceased to exist.  The only thing left was a row of concrete foundations covered with garbage where there used to be houses.  Trash was everywhere, and with no one to haul it and no place to take it anyway, it was either left in place or at best stacked up along the streets and boulevards of every city. 

Down by the coast, cars were tossed around like an angry four year old had thrown a tantrum with his toys.  Boats had floated along with the 30 high wall of water they call the storm surge, then they had been left miles inland when the water receded.  There were boats on top of houses, in the woods.  One partially intact Burger King had a yacht sitting right in the drive through lane.  With all of its firepower combined, it would take the US Army weeks to do what Katrina had done in a day.  And there was the smell.  On the way south, we met one survivor who told us, “If you want to smell what death smells like, just drive to Biloxi.”  That smell was all too common.

My mission, in the middle of this destruction, was to join up National Guard soldiers and provide them spiritual and emotional support.  Most of my training for working with soldiers is in the area of combat stress.  Soldiers going to war face a combination of long hours, physically demanding work, poor living conditions, separation from family, the presence of the dying and the dead, and the possibility of danger.  Do you think they faced similar things in this mission?  You bet they did.

The engineers with whom I started were the first unit in to the hardest hit areas.  They cleared the roads so everyone else could get in to do their work.  Along every road was not just physical debris, but dead fish and animals and once in a while, a human body as well.  So these men knew, as they piled the debris 10’ high along each side of the road to make a path, that they were literally clearing their own valley into the shadow of death.

Before I arrived, there was even one soldier who was killed, when he stepped out of his vehicle into a puddle of water that contained a downed, live power line.  His name was Private Josh Russell.  He was a native of Mississippi, and had survived for a whole year in Iraq, only to be killed helping face a disaster in his home state.

So that’s the disaster into which God called us to minister.  You’ve seen the pictures on TV; they are real, and the devastation is every bit as bad as it looks.  But I also said I was going to talk about the power and the presence of God in the middle of these things, and I think it’s time to do that now.  You already know enough about the chaos and destruction.  It’s time to turn to a God whom we believe is present with those who suffer.  I am here today to testify that it’s true.  The soldiers and people of Mississippi with whom I ministered had lost many things, but they had not lost Christ.  As I told my wife in one of my rare and precious phone calls with her, the Holy Spirit was thick all around us in the people we met.

The Holy Spirit was present in the immediate recovery. Besides caring for soldiers, my secondary mission was to connect with civilian survivors, especially at the local distribution points for food, water, and ice.  There were two locations of choice for these points – retail parking lots, and churches.  The pastors and congregations of these communities, even though they themselves were suffering like everyone else, banded together and sacrificed their recovery time for the sake of the people around them.  I have rarely seen greater love than I saw at First Baptist Church of Bay St. Louis, and Ascension Catholic Church of Kiln, and Bayou Fellowship Church of Picayune.

The Holy Spirit was present in the stories of survival.  I spoke with one retired Baptist preacher who had survived by climbing a tree and clinging 35’ high in the branches for 18 hours until the storm receded.  He didn’t know why he survived, but he believed it was God who protected him, and it was his job now to testify of his Father’s mercy.

The Holy Spirit was present in the hospitality and the gratitude of the survivors.  Everywhere we went, everywhere, people saw the cross on my uniform and they came up to say, “Chaplain, thank you for being here.  Thank you for what you’re doing.”  One man said, “I hope we never have to return the favor, but if we do, we’ll be there.”  Another man, a survivor from New Orleans who was now living with relatives in Mississippi, told me his story outside a Wal Mart and when he was done, said, “Chaplain, I can’t tell you how much it means to me that you all are here for us.  Let me buy you a Coke.”  I still have a home and 2 cars and more stuff inside it than I know what to do with some days.  I should have bought him a Coke.  But it meant a lot to him to be able to show hospitality and say thank you, so I said, “Thank you, sir,” and I drank a Coke with him, and it tasted good.

The Holy Spirit was present in the spirit of cooperation.  Catholics and Baptists and Methodists and military and civilian and Minnesotans and Georgians and black people and white people all knew there was just one team, and we were all on it.  We didn’t know or didn’t care about the finger pointing in the news.  We knew a unity that rarely comes about except in times of great tragedy, when the Spirit of Christ is at his most powerful.

The Holy Spirit was present in the prayers of the people.  Again, when people saw the cross on my uniform, they wanted to talk about the spiritual dimension of their loss, and they wanted to pray.  And so we did.  And God could not have been closer had we been sitting on his lap in the throne room of heaven.

More than anything, the people of Mississippi have asked for your prayers.  They need your help.  They need money.  They need building supplies.  If any one has a $4 billion gift card to Home Depot, they could use it.  But most of all, when I asked how we back in MN could help, they asked for your prayers.  They know they have lost many things.  But they know Christ, and they know Christ is with them.  And even in their heartbreak and struggle, they know they are blessed.  Amen.